Famed heavy metal band debuts new album within Roblox gaming platform
Whether you're launching a new blockbuster movie like Warner Brothers' Shazam 2, a new animated series like Netflix's Sonic Prime, or a new album like Metallica's 72 Seasons, Roblox is increasingly becoming an important marketing channel to reach young, global audiences at scale.
Why? Because Roblox boasts over 66 million daily active users who spend an average of 2.5 hours playing per day. That massive reach and engagement is hard to find elsewhere in the fragmented consumer media landscape we all live in today.
Metallica Turns to Roblox
Founded in the early 1980s, heavy metal band Metallica has been around for over 4 decades, but it's likely that lots of Roblox's younger players have never heard of them at all. So to create buzz and awareness among younger audiences, Metallica offered fans a chance to listen to tracks from their new album 72 Seasons on Roblox, while also getting the chance to earn free UGC items for their avatars.
The band let their followers know about this campaign via its social channels...
The band also built a presence on Roblox by creating an avatar with a bit of history in their about section...
They also created an official Roblox group, which fans can join...
Metallica Integrated Into 5 Roblox Games
Rather than building its own custom game from scratch, which can take many months and requires considerable energy and expertise, Metallica decided to integrate into 5 Roblox games: Apeirophobia, Survive the Killer, Deepwoken 2, Frontlines, and Piggy.
Except for FPS game Frontlines, the partner games were all horror-themed. This makes a lot of sense, especially given Metallica's heavy metal sound.
While there wasn't one central place on Roblox to find which games had partnered with Metallica, I was able to find this information on YouTube, where a video creator had listed out the partner games....
Here's how one of the partner games, Survive the Killer!, promoted the special event with a custom thumbnail and updated Roblox description...
Metallica Sells and Gives Away UGC Items
As part of this marketing campaign, Metallica provided fans a mix of free and paid UGC items, most of which showed off the band's famous logo. My personal favorite is the old school cassette tape, which I'm guessing young players would not be familiar with.
Here are the paid items that fans can buy directly from the Metallica Roblox group or within the Roblox Avatar Shop / Marketplace....
And here are the items that fans could earn by completing music- themed tasks / challenges within the 5 partner games the band integrated into...
Campaign Performance Results
The Metallica event lasted 3 days from April 14-16, 2023. By looking up how much traffic each of the partner games had during that period via RomintorStats, it's easy to calculate how many in-game visits the Metallica campaign reached.
As you can see, the campaigned garnered just about 21 million visits during 3 days. To put that in perspective, last month the top branded experience on Roblox, My Hello Kitty Cafe, had 27 million visits over the course of the entire month. So this result of 21 million visits from Metallica is very strong.
Having this special event only last 3 days certainly placed a sense of urgency on YouTube and TikTok creators to get the word out right away about this limited-time event to their audiences. And it also gave Roblox players a reason to act quickly to claim the free UGC items available.
Piggy, which is the most popular of the 5 games that Metallica partnered with, saw 383K UGC items claimed during the three days, which is approximately 4% of total plays over that period.
Deepwoken 2, which happens to be a Roblox game that requires payment for access to play, resulted in 77K free Metallica UGC items claimed, which is about 2% of total plays.
It's also worth noting that in addition to the nearly 21 million game visits on Roblox and the the over 500K UGC items (I'm not sure exactly how many were given away, since only 2 of the games still display badges revealing this data) given away to players, the campaign also attracted attention off of Roblox.
Roblox TikTokers created videos on that platform that have surpassed 1 million views of related Metallica content, and Roblox YouTubers have amassed over 1.2 million views. These are very valuable media impressions that would be hard for an older-skewing brand like Metallica to be able to earn elsewhere.
Are you interested in figuring out how to bring your entertainment IP to young audiences at scale via Roblox? If so, please reach out because we'd love to help. Email: hello@metaversemarcom.io
Stephen Dypiangco is the CEO of Metaverse Marcom, a strategy and consulting firm helping entertainment and sports brands enter Roblox via UGC items.
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